The Shadowy Millions Behind San Francisco’s “Moderate” Politics
Broadly speaking, those goals include more government power and greater law enforcement; this network and its sponsors often support increased surveillance, decreased police oversight, and drug testing for welfare recipients. TogetherSF advocates holding at-large elections rather than allowing neighborhoods to pick their own representatives on the Board of Supervisors, a sentiment echoed by GrowSF co-founder Steven Buss Bacio on a podcast, along with a desire to merge San Francisco and the moderate areas that surrounded it to create “Bay City.” Despite employing strategic us-versus-them politics, the leaked TogetherSF document lists “political infighting” as a structural problem. Ideally, it states, “the Board of Supervisors would effectively check the power of the Executive, but would be ultimately aligned in values.”
However, disagreement within a democracy is the system working as intended—and most of the people behind the Big Four aren’t politicians, officeholders, or community organizers. They are venture capitalists and founders immersed in startup culture that prizes efficiency above all else, and a wider conversation about governance in a world undergoing near-constant technological transformation.
Misha Chellam, co-founder of the Abundance Network, thinks of himself as an “Abundance Progressive”—part of a movement that correctly identifies problems with gridlock and efficiency, then embraces its diametric opposite, a results-driven approach that does away with roadblocks like environmental impact review and court injunctions. It also seeks to eliminate the power of “narrow interests”: a broad category often illustrated with groups like teachers’ unions and police reform advocates. They hope to create an Abundance Faction within the Democratic Party.
Others have more extreme ambitions. Garry Tan, the president and CEO of the venture capital firm Y Combinator and a GrowSF board member, describes himself on his X profile as an “e/acc,” or effective accelerationist—that is, a believer in an all-gas-no-brakes approach to technological progress that reads like Ayn Rand on (more) uppers in space. “We believe that there is no material problem—whether created by nature or by technology—that cannot be solved with more technology,” Marc Andreessen declares in his “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” one of the most popular effective accelerationist texts. Limitless growth leads to limitless “abundance,” Andreessen writes, which will cause “all physical goods [to] become as cheap as pencils.” Economists tend to disagree, but no matter: Any attempts to question unlimited technological development are not just misguided, but morally repugnant. The manifesto fantasizes about “becoming technological supermen” and paraphrases Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the Italian Futurist who co-wrote The Manifesto of the Italian Fasces of Combat, commonly known as the Fascist Manifesto, in 1919.
